Sacrph 2013 Paper Abstracts

Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 SACRPH 2013 PAPER ABSTRACTS FRIDAY OCTOBER 4, 2013 SESSIONS A - C PAPER SESSION A Session A1: Legacies of Nineteenth Century Networks Chair: TBD Comment: Peter Norton, University of Virginia Mapping the American Streetcar Suburb: Comparative Research on the History of Transit Oriented Development Robert Fishman and Conrad Kickert, University of Michigan In the age of drastically increasing fuel costs, global climate change and the worst financial crisis in a generation, the uncertain position of the American suburban dream prominently features in contemporary scholarly and professional debate among urban planners, designers and architects. Among designers, this debate focuses on future challenges and opportunities, most notably Transit Oriented Development (TOD), which calls the link between between suburban living and automobility into question. While TOD is heralded by many as a key element in a sustainable way forward for suburbia, the history of this planning strategy is often forgotten. This paper aims to link the suburban future to its past by presenting new techniques of morphological research on the American streetcar suburb. Methodologically, the paper focuses on analysis through mapping, illustration and quantitative study. By employing consistent scale and other mapping techniques in all our case studies, we can arrive at a more rigorous socio-spatial comparison of the variety of streetcar suburbs than researchers have hitherto attempted. A range of 29 case studies created by Taubman College graduate students under our direction will illustrate this variety. As horse-drawn and electric streetcars began to open up a vast expanse of previously inaccessible countryside, a symbiosis between the rapidly expanding streetcar networks and new housing and commercial developments on the urban fringe enabled many Americans to pursue their dream of living in the countryside while maintaining proximity to the vitality and economy of central cities. The depicted streetcar suburbs are compared spatially by cartography that includes current building footprints, open spaces and infrastructure. Three-dimensional sections illustrate the variety of building types that can be found in the various streetcar suburbs, as well as the careful balance of public and private open spaces that constitute the ideal of living in nature. The current physical reality is accompanied by a short history describing the conception and evolution of the case studies, complemented by historic and current photographic material. 1 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 While the characteristics of streetcar suburbs vastly differed between cities as far apart as Boston and San Francisco, their essential formula remains as crucial and relevant today as when they were first conceived. Although these suburbs did represent early examples of the American middle-class separating itself from central city life, society and its challenges, most of them included a surprisingly wide range of incomes and land uses. Moreover, the need to walk to a streetcar line gave each of them the spatial definition and walkability currently lacking in auto- dependent suburbs. The streetcar suburbs presented here demonstrate a balance between town and country, between technology and nature and between privacy and sociability – an equilibrium that contemporary urban designers still strive to achieve. The Crash: The Collapse of Urban Cycling in the United States Evan Friss, James Madison University “It seems likely enough just now that some of us who happen to be alive and observant in this year of grace, may come to be regarded with interest by persons still unborn as ancients, who can remember when there were no bicycles, when pavements in cities were still rough, when there were no cinder paths along the country roads, when women almost universally wore long skirts and horses were still almost as common a sight in the streets as human creatures.”1 When the writer for Scribner’s magazine penned these words hailing 1896 as a year defined by the bicycle, the author, like so many of his peers, could never have imagined what was about to happen. Just several years earlier and out of nowhere, bicycles populated American cities. What had been just a few hundred riders slowly grew to a group of a few thousand, before exploding into an army of millions. American cities in the 1890s stood as monuments to the cyclists’ powerful urban force. The ways in which urban Americans lived in, and perceived, the city changed dramatically. Bicycles, as part of a broader transportation revolution, altered contemporary notions of space and time. For those who flocked to the city for its promises of spectacle, excitement, and constant redevelopment, bicycles served as a tangible reminder of the possibilities unleashed in the age of modernity. City streets were not only filled with bicycles, but owed much of their shape to the very wheels that spun across them. The cycling paths that lined most major cities had been a radical development in the pre-nascent field of urban planning. Then, just a few years later, again out of nowhere, bicycles disappeared. The cycling city was no more…at least not in the United States. This paper will consider the reasons why cycling failed to maintain its central place within the American city, including causes related to the role of the state, modes of planning, alternative forms of transportation, and political capital. In particular, the paper will seek to understand why cycling in American cities crashed so quickly and permanently, compared to European cities, which, on the whole, managed to more successfully promote and accommodate bicycles within the transportation network. Pennies, Pavement, and Public Process: The Design and Redesign of Minneapolis Parkways, 1883 to 1980 Heidi Hohmann, Iowa State University 2 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 The scenic parkways of Minneapolis are generally attributed to H.W.S. Cleveland and his 1883 plan for the Minneapolis Park System. However, the Minneapolis parkway system as constituted today differs significantly from Cleveland’s original design. This paper explores how the system was designed and redesigned multiple times, and the way these redesigns reflect changing ideas about the relationships between parks, people, and vehicles in the years between 1883 and 1980. The paper describes the earliest manifestation of Cleveland’s parkways as a predominantly orthogonal boulevard system in the 1880s, its refinement based on ideas of Warren Manning in 1899, and its extension along natural corridors under park superintendent Theodore Wirth from 1906-1937. It then discusses the system’s major redesign in the 1970s under landscape architect and urban planner Garrett Eckbo. Minneapolis hired Eckbo to re- examine the “purpose of the parkways” and his work helped create a compelling Modernist identity for the parkways, accomplished through the design and implementation of standardized lighting, signage, and details, many of which are still used today. To relieve perceived automobile congestion, Eckbo also proposed a major reorganization of the system’s parkways, changing sectional relationships, adding parking, and perhaps most significantly, creating a primarily unidirectional flow around the park’s signature chain of lakes. Many of these changes were highly controversial at the time, sparking angry citizen protests. As a result, the park board appointed a citizen commission to oversee revisions to the Eckbo plan, heralding a future era of public participation in park board actions. Thus, the Eckbo redesign resulted not only in a new physical character for the parkways, but also in a new--and more open-- park planning process. While documenting the history of the parkways’ development, the paper also explicates the changing societal perceptions and use of the parkways as the system evolved from a set of loosely linked pleasure drives and transit routes to a dynamic and multimodal recreational network. Through an evaluation of roadway form and cross-section the paper also shows how, in contrast to other 19th-century urban parkways, the Minneapolis system retained its landscape setting by neither embracing nor rejecting the automobile, but rather by consciously and carefully designing and redesigning the relationships between people, park, and vehicles. The Making of Modern Zoning: Westmount, Canada Raphael Fischler, McGill University This research project builds on my prior research on the emergence of modern urban planning tools in North America, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Fischler 1993, 1998, 2000, 2007, 2013). One of the key debates in North---American historiography is whether zoning is a European import or an “American” creation. It is often argued that zoning is a German import (e.g., Logan 1976) or at least that it was borrowed from Europe as part of a larger exchange of new policies and instruments between the American and European continents (Rogers 2000). Others have argued that zoning was a local invention and that New York City in particular set a pattern for North America with its 1916 comprehensive zoning ordinance (Toll 1969). My research on Canadian cities shows that truth lies more on the latter side on the debate than on the former, but that New York City cannot be given too much credit either. Montréal and Toronto built their modern land---use regulation systems

Load more